CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
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News from CILIP
Tuesday 13 July 2004
For immediate release (Please copy to online discussion lists)
SPENDING REVIEW “MISSED OPPORTUNITY” SAYS LEADING LIBRARY & INFORMATION INSTITUTE
CILIP criticises Review’s failure to recognise learning value of libraries
Chancellor Gordon Brown’s Spending Review is a missed opportunity as far as libraries are concerned, according to CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. “Our hopes may have been high, but our expectations were less so,” was the reaction from CILIP’s Chief Executive Bob McKee. “Unfortunately, we’ve been proved right.”
Although there is some good news, it is thinly spread. Libraries will have a strong role to play in the proposed SureStart Children’s Centres, demonstrating the Government’s recognition that investment in early years education pays social and economic dividends. “This is welcome, as is the extension of the Bookstart scheme, and it accords with the findings of our own report Start with the Child,” Dr McKee points out. “Research demonstrates that early years access to reading, literacy and learning leads to improved life chances.”
CILIP also welcomes the Review’s commitment to increased investment in science and innovation. “Knowledge transfer is a core role for library and information professionals within the scientific community,” Dr McKee adds. “There’s plenty that the information profession can do to facilitate the better communication between academia and industry that the Review calls for.”
Beyond these developments, however, there is little cash for libraries. “We’ll need to see where the increased funding for education goes, and whether the learning role of libraries is properly acknowledged,” says CILIP’s Principal Policy Adviser Guy Daines.
Other than the early years funding, which will come through the Department for Education and Skills, there appears to be no new money at all in the Review for public libraries. “The Department for Culture, Media & Sport has been given a standstill budget in real terms, with sport as the clear priority,” Mr Daines adds. There appears to be no extra money for sustaining the People’s Network - the highly successful scheme to provide free access to the Internet in all public libraries and train staff to help the public in using it. The People’s Network was started with lottery money, but now needs core funding to sustain it. “That would have been our top priority for a DCMS spending boost,” he concludes.
An extra £2 million to boost the current programme of work to improve and develop the public library service was announced by Lord McIntosh at the government's libraries seminar on June 21. “That’s welcome of course,” Dr McKee acknowledges. “But it doesn't deal with two other central issues for which funding is badly needed in many areas - the legacy of years of under-investment in book budgets and buildings. The Spending Review does nothing about these.”
Above all, the Review fails to recognise the value that public libraries offer in support of learning. With millions of pounds more poured into formal schooling, not a penny extra will go on the wider learning opportunities that libraries provide.
CILIP has just had 40,000 children in nearly 2,000 schools and libraries up and down the country extending their reading and developing their critical skills in the national shadowing scheme for the CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Children’s Book Awards. And throughout the rest of the summer, some 600,000 children are expected to take part in The Reading Agency’s annual Summer Reading Challenge - the vast majority of them in public libraries.
Educationalists say that reading schemes such as these reduce the need for remedial work on children’s reading at the start of the autumn term. But the learning value of schemes such as these goes unrecognized in the Spending Review. “We need more research to demonstrate the measurable outcomes that library and information services deliver,” CILIP concludes.
Contact: Tim Buckley Owen, Head of Membership, Marketing & Media.
Tel: 020 7255 0652. Email: [log in to unmask]
Notes to Editors
CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers, with up to 23,000 members working in all sectors, including business and industry, science and technology, further and higher education, schools, local and central government, the health service, the voluntary sector, national and public libraries. For more information about CILIP, please go to www.cilip.org.uk.
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